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OrphanWilde comments on How do humans assign utilities to world states? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, there is one case in which naive utility theory makes perfect sense: when the utility function is just measuring the value of some real-number random variable inside the epistemic model (ie: when reading a number off your map tells you the utility of the territory). Since utility theory was invented to deal with economics, in which such a random variable exists and is called "money", nobody ever bothered to ask what happened when you didn't have such a convenient real-valued, assumed-monotonic random variable.
True. Although I think most utility theorists would be somewhat horrified if you suggested that money was the only thing worth measuring, when measuring utility.
Well of course, because they conceived of utility theory as giving value to money. They also invented a utility theory that only really applies to measuring money. It was a kind of doublethink in which, if real human preferences don't fit a model constructed to deal with money, then economists conclude that humans are Irrational (in a capital-letter ideological sense) rather than trying to come up with a model of evaluative reasoning that actually explains the data gained from real people.